Saturday, November 29, 2008

This month's Daring Bakers' Challenge was all about sugar. I was a little uneasy about baking it since it required making a caramel sauce. I've tried making caramel in the past with some not very good results & a nasty pan to clean up. But the Daring Bakers is all about challenging yourself to try new things so I went ahead & dove in.Actually, making the caramel sauce that gets used in both the cake & the frosting was a lot easier than I expected & I was quite please with my results. I decided to just do half of the recipe, since there is only two of us, & make it into a two layer 4.5-inch cake. I actually ended up having enough cake batter to make the cake & two cupcakes. We ate the cupcakes out of the oven without any frosting & let me tell you this is one good cake! It's a little denser than some cakes & quite moist.The frosting is made with brown butter, a flavor we just love. Many other Bakers thought it was too sweet but we didn't think so. I added a little extra sugar like a few people suggested & the final flavor was like that of a salted caramel, yum! To decorate the cake I put my caramel sauce back on the stove & let it cook a little while longer. I then drizzled the hot caramel on parchment paper to create different shapes. Once the caramel sauce cooled I had hard candy shapes to use on the cake.You can get the recipe by Shuna Fish Lyndon on Bay Area Bites. Thanks to Dolores at Culinary Curiosity, Alex at Blondie & Brownie and Jenny at Foray into Food for hosting what has probably been my favorite challenge yet. Natalie at Gluten-a-Go-Go helped out with making the recipe work for Alternative Bakers.

I like your candied decorations. The cake is cute. My thermometer broke, bought a new one, then it broke. So now I am scared to make anything at 300 degrees. One of these days I am going to make hard candy.

Very nice. I wish I had followed what you had done and made half the recipe. Alas, there is sits, not being eaten. Oh, well. I think your cake looks amazing. I wish I could decorate a cake or at least have an idea of what to do. Well done.